The pharmacy profession has been asking for this for many years.

The Human Medicines Regulations 2012 and the legislation that preceded it say that Prescription Only Medicines can only be supplied in accordance with a prescription.

That means that if the prescription calls for 28 tablets, but the manufacturer supplies packs of 30 tablets, then the pharmacy can only supply 28 tablets.

Two tablets have to be snipped of a blister and put somewhere else. Also, the pharmacy will only be paid for 28 tablets.

There are other disadvantages.

The snipped off tablets have to be packaged and labelled. The mandatory patient information leaflet might stay with the 28 tablets given to a patient, but when the pharmacy has enough snipped off tablets to supply to another patient on another prescription, they won’t have a patient information leaflet to give them.

Read more: Supervision of individual transactions ‘no longer’ needed, cross-sector group finds

Original pack dispensing solves some of these problems. It also provides advantages. For example, an original pack will have a bar code which can be used if the pharmacy has a dispensing robot. It also means that there may be reduced scope for selection errors.

The Department of Health and Social Care finally came around to original pack dispensing and amended the Human Medicines Regulations last year.

However, the amended Regulations only took effect in Scotland, the amended Regulations said they would not take effect in England and Wales until the NHS terms of service were amended.

This is presumably because NHS England and NHS Wales needed to work out what they would reimburse pharmacies that had supplied an original pack that contained a different quantity of tablets to the quantity on the prescription.

The amendments to the English terms of service that will take effect on 1 January 2025 will mean that original pack dispensing can go ahead in England. There is no information about what is happening in Wales.

Read more: The (supervision) elephant is still in the room

The change in the law will probably be welcome, but it does still leave one issue unresolved.

Dispensing a different quantity in a manufacturer’s original pack requires a pharmacist to make the supply or pharmacist supervision - and there is considerable lack of clarity over the meaning of supervision. We await the DHSC’s response to a 12-week consultation on supervision that it began in December 2023.